Modern Library Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century (9)

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me
and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner
and wink your eye at some homely girl.
-H.L. Mencken, Epitaph
(The Smart Set, December 1921)

There seems, even at this late date, some remote possibility that the
revival of conservative thought in America may actually suffice to rescue
the original reputation of H.L. Mencken, as a funny and profound critic
of democracy, and save him from being remembered as only a cranky (perhaps
even racist and anti-Semitic) columnist and the author of a decent early
book on linguistics. This is not to diminish in any way the enduring
value of The American Language;
it remains eminently readable and retains its significance as an important
defense of the distinctiveness and even the superiority of American English
to British English. At the time he wrote, Mr. Mencken's assertion
may have seemed audacious, but who now would argue with his conclusion
that :

When two-thirds of the people who use a certain language
decide to call it a freight train instead of a goods train, they are 'right';
then the first is correct usage and the second a
dialect.

It is indisputably the case today that American is the dominant version
of English across the globe. So he earns plaudit for having the foresight
to see this coming, and the book also remains an interesting example of
the contradictions that made up Mencken's character. For while it
is certainly true that no domestic writer was ever a more ferocious critic
of both the intellectual elite and the great unwashed masses of America,
who he called "the
booboisie", it is also the case that this book evinces an extraordinary,
even sentimental, desire to see American culture taken seriously on the
world stage. Mencken could do worse than stake his future on just
the one book, but we would do well to remember him for much more.

To get some sense of how severe a scourge of American democracy Mencken
truly was we need only quote
him directly :

I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic,
and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads,
cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of
seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing
them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant,
dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all
alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men.
Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality
since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long
run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government,
and even to civilization itself - that civilization,
at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only
that when the suckers are running well the spectacle
is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious
man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend
to be coy. What I can't make out is how any man can believe in
democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained
when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man
be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?

And make no mistake about it, this was not mere disgust with a system
that wasn't working the way it might have; heavily influenced by Friederich
Nietzsche, whose books he was one of the first Americans to translate
and analyze, he was quite explicitly elitist in his views :

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against
the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and
cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization,
then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the
man
who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then
it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both.

Like Nietzsche, he seems to have been hostile to all forms of organized
or systemic belief, which in the teens and 1920s pitted him against America's
prevailing puritanism and other religious fundamentalisms, but would also
find him opposing liberalism, socialism, and the like. Here in one
paragraph, paying backhanded tribute to the departed Calvin Coolidge, we
find him gouging at both ends of the political spectrum :

In what manner he would have performed himself if
the holy angels had shoved the Depression forward a couple of years -
this we can only guess, and one man's hazard is
as good as another's. My own is that he would have responded to bad times
precisely as he responded to good ones - that is,
by pulling down the blinds, stretching his legs upon his desk, and snoozing
away the lazy afternoons.... He slept more than
any other President, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge
only snored.... Counting out Harding as a cipher
only, Dr. Coolidge was preceded by one World Saver and followed by two
more. What enlightened American, having to choose
between any of them and another Coolidge, would hesitate for an instant?
There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither
were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.

Perhaps because his writing was so original and wonderful, or perhaps
because he didn't really scare his targets that much, Mencken was able
to get away with this acerbic style for years. But as Alistair
Cooke's introductory essay to The Vintage Mencken shows, eventually
his opponents--high and low--caught up to him :

He has written nothing since his stroke in 1948,
and it is surely no secret that he ceased to be a missionary force long
before then.
To be precise, it was the Roosevelt era that brought
him to the mat.

At first glance, the New Deal might appear to offer
just the sort of target he loved; a big popular idol, an idealist in the
Wilsonian
tradition who was yet undismayed by the shifts and
audacities necessary to get his own way; moreover, a liberal with the further
stigma of having gone back on a patrician upbringing
for 'the people's' sake. But as a matter of record the New Deal was
Mencken's
Waterloo, and Roosevelt his Wellington. To
jeer at a democratic government when it paid off in filet mignon and a
car in every
garage was one thing. To pipe the same tune
in the unfunny days of 12,000,000 unemployed was another. Mencken's
thunder
issued from an unmaterial mind, but also from a
full stomach. In the thirties it impressed only those who feared
the hungrier chorus
of the breadlines. It was always plain that Mencken
had a clear eye for the realities that conceived the Roosevelt period.
He saw
that the way ahead for America lay between no such
simple choices as he had laid down between 'the aristocrat'--the 'first-rate
man'
speaking his mind--and the 'booboisie' that had
no mind to speak. But this thesis was his specialty, and in a vulgar
time it had made
him famous.

Of course, we can all see now that America never needed a Mencken more
than during the New Deal, but sadly for him, and more sadly for his fellow
citizens, the combination of a needy and greedy populace with an intellectual
elite eager to expose the scope of government was unwilling to listen any
longer to those who sought to point out the error of their ways.
Albert Jay Nock nicely captures the status to which such critics were reduced
by these events in the title of his autobiography : Memoirs
of a Superfluous Man. When the mighty and the lowly make common
cause, then truly is a conservative voice superfluous.

Yet, surely time and the tide of history have vindicated men like Nock
and Mencken, and so we should look not merely to the works that remained
popular throughout the Era of Big Government, but to those writings that
were dismissed in their time. Every fan of Mencken will have his
own favorite from among his voluminous work, but I think the one that best
stands the test of time is his review of a collection of the dissenting
opinions of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. You can find the whole
review on-line, but I'll quote it at some length here :

Mr. Justice Holmes's dissenting opinions have got so much fawning praise
from liberals that it is somewhat surprising
to discover that Mr. Lief is able to muster but fifty-five of them, and
even more surprising to hear from Dr. Kirchwey
that in only one case did the learned justice stand quite alone, and that
the cases "in which he has given expression to
the judgement of the court, [sic] or in which he has concurred in its judgement,
far outnumber, in the ratio of eight or
ten to one, those in which he felt it necessary to dissent."

There is even more surprising stuff in the opinions themselves. In three
Espionage Act cases, including the Debs case,
one finds a clear statement of the doctrine that, in war time, the rights
guaranteed by the First Amendment cease to
have any substance, and may be set aside by any jury that has been sufficiently
alarmed by a district attorney itching
for higher office. In Fox v. the State of Washington, we learn that any
conduct "which shall tend to encourage or
advocate disrespect for the law" may be made a crime, and that the protest
of a man who believes that he has been
jailed unjustly, and threatens to boycott his persecutors, may be treated
as such a crime. In Moyer v. Peabody, it
appears that the Governor of a state, "without sufficient reason but in
good faith," may call out the militia, declare
martial law, and jail anyone he happens to suspect or dislike, without
laying himself open "to an action after he is out
of office on the ground that he had no reasonable ground for his belief."
And, in Weaver v. Palmer Bros. Co. there is
the plain inference that in order to punish a theoretical man, A, who is
suspected of wrong-doing, a State Legislature
may lay heavy and intolerable burdens upon a real man, B, who has admittedly
done no wrong at all.

I find it hard to reconcile such notions with any plausible concept of
Liberalism. They may be good law, but it is
impossible to see how they can conceivably promote liberty. My suspicion
is that the hopeful Liberals of the 20s,
frantically eager to find at least one judge who was not violently and
implacably against them, seized upon certain of
Mr. Justice Holmes's opinions without examining the rest, and read into
them an attitude that was actually as foreign to
his ways of thinking as it was to those of Mr. Chief Justice Hughes. Finding
him, now and then, defending eloquently a
new and uplifting law which his colleagues proposed to strike of the books,
they concluded that he was a sworn
advocate of the rights of man. But all the while, if I do not misread his
plain words, he was actually no more than an
advocate of the rights of lawmakers. There, indeed, is the clue to his
whole jurisprudence. He believed that the
law-making bodies should be free to experiment almost ad libitum, that
the courts should not call a halt upon them
until they clearly passed the uttermost bounds of reason, that everything
should be sacrificed to their autonomy,
including apparently, even the Bill of Rights. If this is liberalism, then
all I can say is that Liberalism is not what
it was when I was young.

Justice Holmes was the darling of the chattering class for many years,
but here Mencken captures not only what made him such a dangerous man,
but also what has come to be one of the greatest threats to our democratic
form of government, the willingness of judges to extend the powers of government
regardless of the will of the people. In all the volumes written
on Holmes, you'll not find a more astute analysis than this contrarian
one written by Mencken when Holmes's reputation was at its apex.

Beyond his admirable daring in the face of popular and elite opinion,
one of the things that's most appealing about Mr. Mencken is that he ultimately
proved unable to live by the austere philosophy he set himself. He,
again following in Nietzsche's footsteps, seems to have believed that the
truly superior man should be able to craft his own morality, without any
reference to, or dependence on, the thinking or utterances of others or
any system of thought. But check out his famous Mencken's
creed :

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has
been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services
on
the ethical side have been more than overcome by
the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.

I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial,
can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood,
however virtuous in intent, can be anything but
vicious.

I believe that all government is evil, in that all
government must necessarily make war upon liberty...

I believe that the evidence for immortality is no
better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.

I believe in the complete freedom of thought and
speech...

I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world,
and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.

I believe in the reality of progress.

I - But the whole thing, after all, may be put very
simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe
that it is better to be free than to be a slave.
And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.

Imagine what a writer of Mencken's own penetration and skepticism could
do with the internal contradictions here. At the same time that he's
denouncing religious belief and the certitude of opinion that accompanies
it, he's announcing his own obstinate and unreasoning faith in the perfectibility
of Man and the ultimate triumph of science over ignorance. Or consider
his famous
dispatches from the Scopes
trial, one can't help but be amused by the irony of Mencken, the iconoclast
supreme when it came to Christianity, so beholden to the implausible theories
of Darwin (not least because he was also a Social Darwinist). This
desperate faith serves to humanize him even as it proves his point about
the failings and foibles of men.

By all means, read The American Language and enjoy one of the
truly original American stylists as he argues in favor of a distinctly
American style. But be sure to also seek out a collection of his
columns, for the argument in the former has long since been decided in
his favor, but his arguments in the latter--about the quite possibly fatal
flaws of democracy--are still timely and remain largely unanswered.
Read him, wrestle with him, and wish he were around today, this American
Socrates.